Saflii Search Detailed Help Guide
SAFLII SEARCH DETAILED HELP GUIDE
Navigation
The navigation menu on the SAFLII home page allows you to explore all available resources for a specific country. At the top of each country menu you will find a link to a country-specific page. For South Africa, this is < The country-specific pages provide you with an up-to-date list of available caselaw, legislation and secondary materials, as well as a Catalogue and Websearch section, providing a selection of links to legal websites from the selected jurisdiction.
Navigating for caselaw:
From the home page, begin by clicking on the link to your selected jurisdiction (e.g. South Africa). Once you have reached the country page you can see all databases of legal material available for this country. Follow the link to the page of the particular collection you are interested in, you will see alphabetical and chronological lists where you can browse available documents, and select a specific document you may be looking for.
South Africa: Supreme Court of Appeal
Database last updated: 17 March 2009
Most recent decision: 17 March 2009
Number of decisions: 3901
Decisions beginning with ...
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Decisions for the years ... 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Search Help
The general search is available in the Home Page Search Box. You can also use the Advanced search for more flexibility in your search criteria. A search engine is a computer program that presents you with a list of documents that match the criteria which you specify. You specify the criteria in the form of 'show me all documents that have the words X, Y and Z in them'. You can narrow the criteria, for example: 'show me documents from Botswana High Court with the words X, Y and Z in them'.
The important thing to note is that the SINO search engine will return to you a list of documents that contain the words (or phrases) that you specify. Therefore you must choose your search words carefully. The best words (or phrases) to choose are those which are unique or particularly distinctive and are, of course, relevant to the subject matter of your query.
After choosing the unique or distinctive words for which you wish to search, type them into the search form. Now decide if you want to see documents that contain
- any of the words listed (this will return the most results);
- all of the words listed;
- the words as a phrase (ie, in the exact order as typed); or
- the words as a legislation name (ie Act or Regulation title);
- the words as a case name (ie the names of the parties to a court/tribunal case);
- the words as a document title.
Make your selection on the search form.
Finally, decide whether you wish to search across all of the SAFLII databases, an individual database or a group of related databases (eg All Case Law Databases) and then make your selection(s) from the database list.
When ready, press Search. A list of documents will be returned to you. You can edit your search in the query box at the top of the screen, or you can use Back on your browser to return to the search screen in order to refine your search.
The SINO search engine will relevance rank the results by default, which means that the best matches will appear at the top of the list. You will obtain the best results when searching for unique or distinctive words or phrases.
Two additional search options which you will notice on the search form are using autosearch and this Boolean query. These are explained below.
Using Autosearch
If you are typing in a search from the SAFLII home page, the sytem will treat this as an AutoSearch type search. SAFLII will analyse the words for which you are searching and attempt to apply the correct search approach for you.
- Boolean search
Autosearch will recognise a boolean search by the presence of boolean operators in the words for which you are searching. So, if you use any of the following operators, and, or, near, w/10 etc, then AutoSearch will automatically treat the search as a Boolean search. If you do not want these words to be treated as boolean operators, you must put the phrase of which they are part in double quotation marks (ie "dogs and cats" and not dogs and cats). NOTE: Excessive placing of phrases in quotation marks can lead to very slow searching. - Case name search
Autosearch will recognise a search which contains v, v., vs, vs. or re as a search for a case name. The search results will be restricted to documents containing the phrases on either side of these identifiers, or immediately after the re. So, for example, the following searches all work: Mngquibisa and Another v The State, State vs Mngquibisa, In re: Dynamic Services (Pty) Limited and The Attorney General and Another, Re: Dynamic Services (Pty) Limited and The Attorney General and Another - Single phrase search
Autosearch will recognise words enclosed in double quotation marks as a phrase search. So the words "cats and dogs" enclosed in double quotation marks will trigger a phrase search. Note that Autosearch can only deal with a single phrase in double quotation marks. If you want to search for two or more phrases, you will need to use a Boolean search instead.
Unless autosearch recognises your search as one of the above searches, it will default the search type to an any of these words search. Do not forget that you can override autosearch by explicitly choosing another search type.
Advanced (Boolean) Searches
If you do a search from the Advanced Search Pages, the system switches by default to boolean mode. The Advanced Search form also allows you to select several other common search types ("all of these words", "words in a document title" etc).
If you want more than one phrase or word to appear in the retrieved documents, put the boolean operator and between them. For example, to find documents containing the phrase moral rights as well as the word copyright, you would type: moral rights and copyright.
If, on the other hand, you want to find either one term and/or another term, put an or between them. For example, to find documents which contain the words treaty, convention or international agreement you would type: treaty or convention or international agreement. If you wanted to, you could even put these two searches together - as in: (treaty or convention or international agreement) and moral rights and copyright.
The use of round brackets helps the search engine determine which instructions to process first.
If you want to find two words or phrases which appear fairly close to each other (for example, the parties to a case), you can use the near proximity operator. If you wanted to find cases where Smith sued (or was sued by) Brown, you would type: smith near brown.
Displaying Search Results
Once you have performed a search on SAFLII you will be presented with a page, or several pages, of results. At this point you may decide to further refine the display of your search results using the features of the SAFLII search results screen which are described below.
As you can see from the search results header on the right, the page displaying results of any SAFLII search offers four primary ways to display your results. We suggest that you experiment with the various ways in which your search results can be displayed.
By Relevance
'By Relevance' is the default results display which lists the results by the order of their likely relevance to the search request, with the most relevant results occurring first.
The Collapse Multi-sections | Show All Sections option makes search results which contain numerous references to legislation more readable by reducing the number of sections of an Act or clauses of a Regulation which are visible. If 'Collapse Multi-sections' is chosen, the only the name of the Act or Regulation and the name of the most relevant section or clause is displayed. The search can be further refined by restricting it to a single Act or regulation by clicking on 'More results from this legislation'. If 'Show All Sections' is chosen, every section or clause is shown and ranked separately.
By Date
The results are sorted by date order, most recent date displayed first (ie reverse chronological order). Legislation is displayed by the date the Act was passed or the Regulation made, not by the date on which a particular section or clause was amended. The Collapse Multi-sections | Show All Sections option is also available here. Caselaw is sorted and displayed by the date a judgment was handed down.
By Title
The results are sorted alphabetically by the title of the document, and displayed from a-z. The Collapse Multi-sections | Show All Sections option is available here. In addition, there is a Collapse Title option which groups the results together based on the first alphanumeric character in the title, that is, 'A' to 'Z' and then '0' to '9'.
By Database
The search results are displayed grouped into the databases on which they are located. The databases are displayed in the order in which they appear in SAFLII’s menu structure (not by number of results found in each).
To view the results from only one database, click on the number of documents next to the name of the database (Note: to see the results from all databases again, it is necessary to use the web browser's 'back' button).
The Collapse Listing | Expand Listing option is only available when using the 'By Database' display. 'Collapse Listing' will first collapse all results into groupings of databases by document type and jurisdiction. If used again it will collapse the databases into Country/Court Case Law Databases, Country Legislation Databases, etc. With this display option, all cases or all legislation can be chosen without using the Advanced Search page to choose database groupings. If the 'Expand Listing' option is then chosen, the process will be reversed.
Additional search results features
Repeat search over
At the top right of a results page, there is a panel which lists the 'Repeat search over' options which allow you repeat your AustLII search over other collections of data. The options are:
- All SAFLII Databases: Searches for your search terms through all collections published on SAFLII.
- Catalog & Websearch: Searches categories in the WorldLII Catalog, and full text of those catalogued web sites accessible to SAFLII's web spiders; takes you to the WorldLII results page.
- WorldLII Databases: Searches all 660+ databases on the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII); takes you to the WorldLII results page.
- Law on Google: Converts the SAFLII search into the correct format for a Google search; adds terms to the SAFLII search to restrict it to law-related materials; executes the search on Google and takes you to the Google results page.
Number of results per page
Where all search results are displayed, an option at the top of a results page on the righthand-side allows you to choose between displaying 10, 20 (default), 50 or 100 results per page.
Using Cases
The case law databases contain the decisions of judges in matters before a court or tribunal. In each decision the judge will go over the facts of the case, the relevant law in the circumstances, and then discuss how the law applies to the relevant facts. The judge may also refer to relevant legislation (laws or "acts" passed by parliament), regulations or international treaties. As a result, case law is often important in understanding how particular acts of parliament operate and apply day to day.
The SAFLII case law databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. This generally includes the following:
- references to other cases from across the World;
- references to Acts; and
These links are inserted automatically by our hypertext markup software, which uses complex heuristics to determine exactly which documents a citation might refer to. In most cases the links are correct, however sometimes errors are made due to the nature of language writing, and legal writing in particular. You should also bear in mind that links to acts go to the current version of the act, not necessarily the version of the act that applied to the facts of the case.
At this time, we have limited access to full text legislation for countries covered by SAFLII, but anticipate activating this useful feature in future.
Each case is preceded by a number of links. The meaning of these is as follows:
- SAFLII Logo
Clicking on the SAFLII Logo will take you back to the SAFLII home page. - [Index]
Takes you to the index or home page for the current database or "collection". You normally do this if you want to continue browsing for additional cases. - [Search]
Lets you perform a search over the entire SAFLII database (or parts of it). For details on using our search engine, see our online Search Help. - [LawCite]
Searches for all materials which refer to the current case. This will display all other cases which refer to this case. - Link to RTF of original document or [Download]
Clicking the link will take you to a page that will allow you to download the case in RTF (Rich Text Format) and/or ASCII (plain text). Sometimes we may not have any downloadable versions of the case available - in this situation you can use your web browser's "File > Save as" function to download the online version of the case. - Link to PDF of original document.
This document has been created using Optical Character Recognition software.
SAFLII primarily sources documents from the originating courts. Sometimes this involves scanning of hardcopy documents which are in turn read by an Optical Character Recognition software and converted to HTML for display purposes. An authentic copy of the image of the document with underlying text is stored as a PDF file and made available for download through the Link to PDF of original document facility. The PDF version of such OCR'd documents should be your preferred version of the document. - [Context]
Clicking "Context" will take you to the first of the search terms for which you searched which occurs in the decision. Note that this option only appears when you have used the SAFLII search engine to find the decision. - [Help]
Displays this help page.
A full list of the cases databases available from SAFLII may be found on the SAFLII Databases page.
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